Exploring Spirituality

Exploring spirituality is a powerful mechanism for self-awareness, growth and evolution. Opening to spiritual exploration is for some, an ever-present call, for others perhaps a spontaneous awakening, or the result of a life-altering experience.

Leveraging the Inspiration

Whatever the mechanism, unfolding and leveraging the inspiration, insights, awareness gleaned from spiritual practice happens through anchoring and grounding into embodied form. 

The physical and emotional body must collaborate to receive and actualize spiritual insights and conscious awareness. One of my early and most important teachers, John Friedlander, said, ‘as far in your body you can go is how far out of your body you can go’. I’ll never forget the moment I heard those words. I was really good at the latter approach, but being in my body? No thank you!

My Story

I was raised a Christian Scientist; spiritual practice was part of my experience from childhood into early adulthood. I can’t say I owned my religious beliefs. I’d say they were imposed, and unquestioned. Further, those beliefs remained untethered from my awareness, they were easily repeated, but they lacked a cellular and emotional connection or meaning.

In my late twenties, after a multi-year hiatus from any sort of spiritual practice, I ended my marriage and moved to Southern Maine with my pre-school age son. I knew no one in Maine, with the exception of a difficult relative who lived 45 minutes away.

The Awakening

Ending my marriage caused an awakening. I accepted my status as the common denominator in every one of my relationships. I also acknowledged my inner loneliness. What I felt inside was desolation, a void, not of self, but of connected self. My insides were mirrored on the outside. I was alone on 20 acres of land, living in a state I’d chosen because of childhood memories of summer camp, with no connection to me in current reality. 

So, I began. Studying. Practicing. Exploring. Communicating. I had a therapist, I read books, I attended lectures, I studied. My inner void began to fleetingly fill.

Why couldn’t the teachings and practices sustain me? Why was it so difficult to maintain the understanding, the spiritual elevation, the state of awareness I could achieve in meditation, or in a class or lecture?

Through my energy studies, I observed that I held my spiritual awareness appropriately in my Astral energy body. I learned this by clearing my chakras and aura, using what I was gleaning spiritually to let go of emotions, energies, behaviors, patterns that inhibited my ability to hold the spiritual state or operate from my conscious awareness.

Being Grounded is the Key

I also realized that none of this was worth much if I wasn’t grounded in my Astral body and integrated with my Etheric energy and physical body. Emotions and insights have no form or mechanism for expression unless integrated with the physical body to experience and express them!

My mother, a Christian Science practitioner, used to describe people who had this energetic split as ‘too heavenly minded to be any earthly good’.

The phrase may be a little harsh (so was my mother), but it definitely speaks to the embodiment gap.

Embodiment Gap

The statement about harshness also speaks to the embodiment gap. After 30 years in client practice, and my own embodiment journey, many deeply spiritual people who have difficulty embodying their awareness also have a story with harshness as a backdrop. Abuse, trauma, painful losses, violence, poverty, any number of experiences that could cause a turn to spirituality as a method of coping, finding hope, peace, and agency.

The gap between the Astral/emotional and Etheric/physical bodies can easily be generated through disconnecting the emotional self from what is happening in the room. Therapists call this dissociation. To protect and serve the psyche, awareness separates from the physical body’s experience. It’s an essential strategy when unable to fend for or care for oneself.

The part of self that would block emotional connection with physical experience, that would do what it takes to survive is also the part that would embrace and pursue spiritual practice.

Integration Is The Key

Integration is a key aspect of efficacious energy healing. When the emotional body is isolated from the physical body, life is difficult to actualize. The body goes through the motions, and the untethered aspect of emotional awareness is in its own vacuum of experience. Insights emerge but have no place to land, and the vague sense of disconnection and the actualization echo chamber in the physical body impact esteem and optimism.

Sometimes the gap between the emotional and the physical is an actual tear in the energy field. The individual with an Astral Break has an aura that is severed between the 3^rd and 4^th chakra. Sometimes an Astral Break remains invisible, undetected by an energy practitioner until the client is ready to coalesce and integrate. Often the client has been doing some deep work to invite the integration between the two energy bodies and is beginning to have an experience of life in this integrated flow state. It’s not perfect, but it’s real.

In other cases, an embodiment protocol can support integration, particularly if the individual is aware of the vacuum, whether it is named dissociation or lack of embodiment.

The great thing about this protocol is that you need not have a deep, comprehensive understanding of the Astral chakras and aura to bring your spirituality and your body to a place of integration. It is, however, a practice. Do it once in a while, and you won’t have the same results as you will if you take this on as a practice and do it repeatedly throughout the day.

Think of it in the same way you’d think of engaging your core. The more you engage your abs, the faster your body gains strength and capacity. The more you work with embodiment, the faster your spirituality connects to your physical experience!

Embodiment Protocol

Here’s the embodiment protocol I teach clients and students who are committed to their spiritual practice and need to integrate their spirituality with their experience:

Set Feet chakras – 60% open. The chakra petals open down to the Earth, supporting your ability to be deeply embodied, and to let go and release energies that do not serve.

Set 2^nd chakra to 15-25% open. The chakra petals open out to the horizon, both in the front and back of the body. The 2^nd chakra’s function is to enable inner emotional awareness (as opposed to the trauma-generated empathic tendency to sense and absorb other people’s emotions).

Set 7^th chakra to 15-25% open. The chakra petals open up to the sky, connecting you to spiritual, Cosmic energy flows. When not in spiritual practice, an excessively open 7^th chakra is a primary factor in ‘too heavenly minded’ awareness.

Ground. Creating a ball of green energy in your first chakra, imagine gravity creating a cord of energy that migrates to the center of the Earth, anchoring your Astral body and its energy, and balancing your embodied awareness with your spiritual connection.